Town Undokai...

Sunday, October 8th was our town's sports day/undokai. Yes that means the kids in our town have 2 sports days a year. 1 for all elementary school students PLUS town undokai. And same for the local one and only JHS they have their regular JHS undokai and also have to attend town undokai too. If you don't show up, you will be marked absent. The bright side is you get off school on Tuesday. So that's sort of nice. JHS kids have to stay from like 7am to 5pm-ish. I remember this when Bran was in JHS. But elementary kids need to be there only from 9am to 11:30am. And elementary kids only have 1 event. Noah's grade did a basketball race and as soon as that was over and done with, we were allowed to leave and go home. So 9am to 11:30am is not too terribly bad at all. Because this is town undokai. You *must* sit according to neighborhood. Where you live dictates where you can sit. We live in a newer housing community and so our "housing community" has their own 2 tents (1 for JHS kids and 1 for elementary kids) and we all sit behind our housing community's tent. The other housing communities have their own tents and they do the same. The older parts of town also have their own communities too and they sit behind their own tents too. Meals/lunches are bought courtesy from where you live. We live in our housing community and we pay month's HOA fees (homeowners association fees) so because we do that...we can order up to 4 obento if we decide and it will be paid for totally 100%. They pass around the monthly kairanban/information booklet a month in a advance and you can order however many lunches you want, but they know how many family members are in each house. I packed my kids sandwiches. And I made myself a salad. An easy town undokai meal. And my husband absolutely looks forward to the seafood/fish obento. So he always orders two meals. And so he feasts on fish on town undokai day. Hahaha. : ) Here is a pic of Noah and his 6th grade friend and classmate sitting in the same area and that's because he lives in our same housing community too. The older JHS boys sitting near Noah but on the older kids JHS leisure sheet also live in the same housing community as us too. 

All kids regardless of which grade do warm up exercises. You can see Noah in his bright colored New Balance sneakers warming up in this particular picture.

Noah and 3 of his classmates ran this race together. You have to run and then at a certain point you have to pick up a basketball and start bouncing it down your running lane.

Branden and I were standing on the sidelines next to eachother cheering on Noah. Go Noah go!!!!! And Noboru was meanwhile video taping Noah run his race on the other side of the field.

Noah came in first place! Branden was so proud. We all were! Good job Noah. We love you!

After Noah's race, we stayed for lunch and after lunch we packed up and went home. We spent the rest of the day relaxing and enjoying our Sunday at home. For dinner we decided to go to Narita City to our nearest pizza place and bring home some Domino's. 4 large pizzas. We had a pizza party here at the house. And because Monday was a national holiday in Japan, Branden and Noah did not have school that Monday. And Tuesday Noah didn't have school either, because he had town undokai. So all in all, Sunday was really nice. We did have sports day, but it was really low key. We didn't have to wake up super early either. An excellent Sunday October 8th and super low key town undokai. : )